SEMI-NEWS: A Satire of Recent News

SEMI-NEWS/SEMI-SATIRE: September 2, 2018 Edition

Candidate Calls for Free Health Care for Illegals

Former San Francisco Mayor and current Democratic candidate for governor of California Gavin Newsome has pledged to make health care free for all illegal immigrants if he wins in November. "When I was Mayor I extended the boundaries of freedom beyond what is provided in any other city in America," Newsome boasted. "The most well-known of these freedoms is, of course, the freedom to defecate in public without fear of penalty. But an overlooked freedom was using public funds to ensure that every undocumented person residing in the city received the same benefits that citizens are required to purchase under Obamacare."

Newsome defended the disparate treatment by citing "the unforgivable gap between the wealth of those who have good-paying jobs, careers, and businesses and those who literally had nothing but the clothes on their backs when they crossed the border from Mexico. Those who have must bear the burden of caring for those who have-not. I look forward to expanding the advances I made in San Francisco into a statewide transformation of the way all Californians live."

In related news, the public defecation that had previously been confined to neighborhoods infested with homeless vagrants has popped up at the SF airport where cabbies waiting to pick up fares have been relieving themselves on the pavement. Airport officials are outraged, but several cab drivers have spoken out in defense of the practice saying that the threat of sanctions against them for public defecation "is an infringement on the rights that were granted to everyone by Mayor Newsome."

Staff Changes at the Special Prosecutor's Office

Signs that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to ramp up the enforcement phase of his campaign against the Trump Administration was indicated by the departure of two lower-ranking prosecutors. The slots will be filled by two former military sharpshooters.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, explained that "the seriousness of the threat to the nation posed by President Trump combined with his power to thwart normal legal procedures has forced Mr. Mueller to consider a more forceful approach." Carr cited the action taken to neutralize Osama bin Laden as a precedent for Mueller's decision. "The nation didn't limit itself to an impractical option of arresting and prosecuting bin Laden and we shouldn't expect the Special Counsel to do so when confronted with the greater threat posed by Trump."

Carr added "it is our hope that by being upfront in our announcement of the staffing adjustments that President Trump will take the hint and resign of his own free will. We're not eager to get more blood on our hands than is necessary, but we will do whatever we have to in order to save the nation from a dangerous usurper."

Sean Casten, the Democratic candidate in Illinois' 6th Congressional District hailed the Special Counsel staff changes, calling them "the kind of 'outside-the-box' thinking we need in these perilous times. I thought I was the only one who saw the remarkable similarities between Trump and Osama. I'm glad to see that Robert Mueller is on the same page and is preparing to take the extreme measures required to deal with it."

In related news, Georgetown University law professor Joshua Geltzer told a CNN audience that "it is not enough that Trump just be removed from office, all evidence that he was ever the president must be erased. Don't think it can't be done. There is historical precedent for such an erasure. In ancient times the names of reviled Pharaohs were chiseled off monuments. More recently, the Soviet Union erased the records of traitors from their history, even going so far as to retouch old photos. These erasures have helped deprive the disloyal unknowns hiding among the population from rallying around the memory of the enemies of the state."

Along these lines, billionaire globalist George Soros is funding a Media Matters scheme aimed at eliminating Trump supporters from access to social media by the year 2020. David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America, bragged that "we will coordinate with Google, Facebook and Twitter to implement the suppression of anti-democratic content from conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters whenever and wherever possible."

MSNBC Panel Agrees "Trump Supporters Are Selfish"

A panel hosted by MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle unanimously agreed that Trump supporters, unlike those who oppose him, are "selfish." Ruhle set the tone, saying that "the morally reprehensible behavior of the President doesn't seem to bother these people. I mean, there was the 'Access Hollywood' tape that should have destroyed him during the last weeks of the 2016 campaign. Now, there is a plausible contention that he had sex with Stormy Daniels ten years ago and paid her off to keep quiet about it. Is this the kind of person we want as our president?"

"What I am hearing from Trump supporters is their satisfaction with the job he is doing as president," Ruhle said. "They like the tax cuts. They like the low unemployment. They like keeping immigrants from sneaking into the country. They like the 'originalist' judges he's appointed to the courts. These are all selfish reasons for supporting Trump. They don't consider things like how will Trump's policies affect those who depend on government to support them, or that jobs are boring, or that the border with Mexico was established by conquest, or that a rigid adherence to the text of the Constitution limits judges' ability to rule in favor of social justice. They are thinking about what's better for them when they should be thinking about what's better for others."

Co-anchor Ali Velshi found Trump supporters' opposition to government-funded abortions to be "an especially egregious example of selfishness. They'd rather have lower taxes than pay for women to terminate their pregnancies. Without access to free abortions more children will be born and the world will become even more clogged with unneeded humans."

Billionaire Tom Steyer predicted that "this selfishness will not prevail at the polls. I'm seeing a lot of enthusiasm among Democratic voters. I think we will see victories for candidates who will undo the tax cuts, restore welfare benefits, open the border, and enact fully socialized health care. That's where my money is invested."

Blame for Chinese Espionage Coup Unclear

The execution of 20 CIA spies by the Chinese government during the Obama term was a serious setback for America's national security. The question of who is to blame remains a matter of dispute. Candidates include Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

It was revealed earlier in August that a member of Sen. Feinstein's staff for the last 20 years was, in fact, a spy for the Chinese government. Feinstein was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2009 to 2017 and would have been privy to a lot of classified material that might have been purloined by the Chinese spy she employed. She also has a history of lobbying for legislation viewed as favorable toward Chinese interests. She has attempted to rebuff accusations that she may be the person at fault for the loss of our spies in China by pointing out that "the spy on my staff was mostly a chauffeur and not an intentional participant in any discussions of classified information I may have had during the Obama years."

It has also been discovered that in 2015 the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) warned the FBI that a Chinese company had hacked into the unsecure computer that Clinton used when she was Secretary of State and implanted software that automatically sent copies of her emails to China. Unfortunately, the FBI agent that the ICIG warned was Peter Strzok who took no action to block this security breach. It's possible that among the classified data transmitted by Secretary Clinton via her computer was information identifying the US spies that were later executed. In her defense, Clinton has asserted that "I would never knowingly have transmitted classified information that could have proved harmful to America's interests."

In its continuing quest to absolve Hillary Clinton for every crime she has committed, the FBI asserted that "we have no evidence that Secretary Clinton's computer was hacked by the Chinese." This assertion stands in contrast to the FBI's assertion that Russians hacked her computer. The distinction is baffling since the FBI has never had access to her computer because she irreversibly erased all of its contents claiming that "all government-related documents had already been turned over and only personal correspondence remained"--a statement that has subsequently been discredited.

Dem Objections to Supreme Court Nominee Mount

Democrats' objections to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh continue to mount. Sen. Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) complains that "all I see from his record is a slavish devotion to the written law. I see no willingness to consider the unwritten law or the social justice implications of refusing to create new laws when circumstances warrant it."

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn) found "Kavanaugh's lack of military experience a bit troubling. My Vietnam service has been an essential building block of my career. I couldn't have been the effective senator I have been without it."

Sen. Christopher Coons (Del) lamented "the inadequate paper trail provided by the Republicans. We need to see every document Judge Kavanaugh has ever touched if we are to give the fully informed advice and consent that the Constitution has assigned to us as senators."

The "every document" demand amounts to nearly 3 million additional pages and would take many months to assemble. Right now the senators have access to 500,000 pages of documents—more than twice as many pages as have been provided for any previous Supreme Court nominee by either Party.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-SC) derided what he labeled "an insatiable appetite for irrelevant trivia. The key documents senators should be reading to evaluate Judge Kavanaugh's fitness are his written decisions in actual cases. These are the instances in which a judge has to rule on the law. Any admin work he might have done before he was a judge isn't pertinent to or indicative of his legal reasoning."

Cuomo Attacks GDP as Measure of Economic Health

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), anxious to build on the momentum set in motion by his earlier assertion that "America was never that great," demanded a better measure of the nation's economic health. "I know that the Trump Administration is touting last quarter's 4.2% rise in GDP as a sign that the economy is booming," the Governor observed. "But is this really the best measure we can come up with? GDP growth never got as high as 3% during the Obama Administration. But can we really say that Americans weren't better off then?"

"The problem with GDP is that it is founded on the notion that more is better—more output, more jobs, more profits—but is this true?" Cuomo asked. "More output means we have more stuff, but isn't a lot of this stuff just more junk to clutter our lives? More jobs means less leisure—is this what we really want? And doesn't more profits only encourage more investment and lead back to more output and more jobs in a kind of vicious circle?"

"I have a sense that people were really better off during the more stable years under the Obama Administration," Cuomo imagined. "Fewer people were ensnared in the rat race. More were able to live worry-free on the generous benefits provided by the government. We need a better way to measure that type of intangible enjoyment of life so we can more fairly compare the peace and serenity of the Obama years with the crushing burdens of work that have inspired so many people to take to the streets and assault their fellow citizens now that Trump is president."

Meanwhile, Cynthia Nixon, Cuomo's opponent in the Democratic primary, has called for "less investment in law and order and more investment in free health care. Law and order has different impacts on different segments of society. Not everyone agrees that the current owners of property are morally entitled to hold onto it. Why should they vote for a governor who favors law and order? Free health care, on the other hand, benefits those on either side of the law. Both the victim of rape and the burglar shot by a home owner would benefit from the universal free health care program I will implement when I am elected governor."